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Former Russian Spy Poisoned by Nerve Agent, U.K. Police Say

Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer, is in critical condition; U.K.-Russia tensions rise

British officials said former spy Sergei Skripal, shown shopping in Salisbury, England, last month, and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent. The former colonel in Russian military intelligence has lived in England since a 2010 spy exchange with Moscow.
Photo:
ITN/Associated Press

LONDON—The poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter was carried out with a nerve agent, British officials said Wednesday, in a targeted attack on British soil that threatens to escalate tensions between London and the Kremlin.

Sergei Skripal,
a 66-year-old former colonel in Russian military intelligence who has lived in Britain since a 2010 spy exchange, and his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, were in critical condition after being found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping mall in southwestern England on Sunday afternoon. A police officer who was one of the first on the scene is also seriously ill, authorities said.

Police said they were treating the case as attempted murder and had identified the nerve agent used, which would help them identify its source. They declined, however, to name the specific substance. On Tuesday U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said that if Russia was behind the poisoning, it would face sanctions. Russia’s government has denied any involvement.

Relations between London and Moscow have been strained since the 2006 poisoning of
Alexander Litvinenko,
a former Russian intelligence agent who had become a Kremlin critic and a British citizen. He suffered a slow, painful death after meeting his killers in a London bar and drinking tea laced with polonium-210, a deadly radioactive isotope of the element polonium.

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A high-level British investigation concluded in 2016 that the killing of Mr. Litvinenko was probably an operation of the Russian domestic security service, the FSB, approved by Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
Russia denied the claim.

The use of a nerve agent in Sunday’s attack on Mr. Skripal and his daughter strongly suggests state involvement. “It’s a bit of a giveaway. In itself, it’s a signal,” said Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College, London.

Nerve agents—which can be inhaled or absorbed through the skin—disrupt signals from nerves to muscles and other body parts and can lead to death by asphyxiation. The nerve agent VX was used to kill the half-brother of North Korean leader
Kim Jong Un
by alleged assassins last year.

Experts cautioned it could be too early to point the finger at the Kremlin, which seeks to have Western sanctions against the government and officials lifted.

“A lot of Russian officials have assets in Britain,” said Olga Oliker, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Do they really want to see tighter travel rules? I don’t think this would be in the Russian government’s interest.”

Mr. Skripal was part of a group of three intelligence officers and a nuclear scientist convicted of treason in 2006. In 2010 the four were exchanged in Vienna for 10 Russian agents arrested in the U.S., in one of the largest spy swaps since the Cold War.

Mr. Putin greeted the Russian agents personally when they arrived back in Moscow. After singing patriotic Soviet songs with them, the Russian leader said he knew who had betrayed them and suggested they would suffer the consequences. “Traitors always end badly,” he said. “They finish up as drunks, addicts, on the street.”

The attack in Salisbury came days after Mr. Putin sharpened rhetoric against the West in a speech to top officials, boasting of nuclear weapons that could penetrate U.S. defenses and showing an animated video of a missile heading toward the U.S.

Mr. Putin has mobilized Russia’s limited resources in recent years to burnish its status as a global power, particularly through its intervention in Syria. In the speech last week, he underlined his goal that the Kremlin’s voice be heard in the West on security matters.

As relations have worsened since Russia annexed Crimea and began military interventions into eastern Ukraine in 2014, the West has accused Russia of using various tools to probe weak points and undermine democratic institutions, from cyberattacks to an online army to sow discord.

If it turns out Russia is the culprit in Sunday’s attack, it would represent a violation of unwritten rules of espionage. Mr. Freedman, a longtime scholar of state strategy, said an attack on an individual who had been exchanged in a spy swap appeared to have few, if any, precedents and could undercut the future value of such trades.

“It raises lots of interesting questions. Is this private enterprise, is it connected to rogue elements of the FSB, is this something that somebody has seriously decided upon as a matter of policy? These are interesting questions that I don’t know the answer to,” he said.

A police evidence tent covers the spot in Salisbury, England, where Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found critically ill on Sunday.
Photo:
Frank Augstein/Associated Press

Russia has been accused of other such breaches of spy protocol in the past. FSB operatives seized an Estonian security officer at gunpoint on Estonian territory in 2015 and took him to Russia, where he was convicted of espionage. He was later swapped for an Estonian who had been convicted of spying for Russia.

Hundreds of detectives, forensics specialists and intelligence officers were working together “around the clock” on the case, said Mark Rowley, the U.K.’s top counterterrorism officer.

“Our role now, of course, is to establish who is behind this and why they carried out the attack,” Mr. Rowley said.

In the Litvinenko poisoning case, the U.K. inquiry found that the polonium was intentionally administered to Mr. Litvinenko by Andrei Lugovoi, a former FSB colleague, and Dmitry Kovtun, a Russian businessman.

Before the poisoning, Russian special forces used a poster of Mr. Litvinenko for target practice at a gunnery range outside of Moscow.

The U.K. didn’t impose any sanctions on Russia over the Litvinenko case. It has attempted to extradite Mr. Lugovoi and Mr. Kovtun since the time of the killing, but Russia has refused, saying it would be unconstitutional. Mr. Lugovoi is regarded as a national hero inside Russia and holds a seat in Russia’s parliament. He has denied any role in Mr. Litvinenko’s death.

Like Mr. Litvinenko, Mr. Skripal in the years following his flight to the U.K. had offered his expertise to the U.K. government. His knowledge, however, was somewhat dated, since he hadn’t seen any service for more than 14 years.

At one briefing for U.K. special forces two years ago, Mr. Skripal “was not really up to speed with the latest targeting methods” used by Russia and third- world security services, said one official who attended the talk.

On Wednesday, speaking before the U.K. announcement about the use of a nerve agent, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman
Maria Zakharova
pointed to the high-profile deaths of two Russia businessmen—Alexander Perepilichny in 2012 and Boris Berezovsky in 2013—in the U.K. as previous cases where she said Russia had been wrongly accused by Western media.

Mr. Perepilichny collapsed and died while jogging, and Mr. Berezovsky was found on his bathroom floor with part of a scarf around his neck.

“Once again, there will be absolutely baseless, unfounded accusations [and] then everything will be kept secret,” Ms. Zakharova said. “We don’t have information on what could have been the cause...of this ‘story.’”

—Stephen Fidler, James Marson and Anatoly Kurmanaev contributed to this article.

Corrections & Amplifications North Korea’s leader is Kim Jong Un. An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to his father, Kim Jong Il. (March 7, 2018) Also, Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210, a deadly radioactive isotope of the element polonium. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said polonium is an isotope. (March 8, 2018)

Appeared in the March 8, 2018, print edition as 'Nerve Agent Felled Russian Ex-Spy.'